“Huh?”
“I thought you’d be a lot more nervous about tonight.”
“…Oh. Right.” Maou smiled with Chiho. He knew what she meant.
Once he was off duty tonight, he would be making his way to Ueno—in other words, he’d be departing for Ente Isla. It would have to be late night, since this was the one shift he simply couldn’t weasel out of, no matter how hard he tried. He had to pick up that manual, at the very least.
“I mean,” he continued, “once we’re over there, it’s gonna be a pretty simple job. We go over, we pick up Emi and everyone, we go back. If we get any interference, we’ll just have to send ’em running.”
His face sagged a bit.
“Over here, though, it ain’t gonna be so easy with this delivery stuff. I’m not really handy with the maps we’ll need to use yet. We have to get the food delivered before it turns cold, but there’s all kinds of traffic rules we’ll have to stick to, too. Red lights, speed limits, hook turns…”
“Guess it’s a lot of rules for someone like you, huh, Maou?”
Only in Japan would the Devil King, capable of free flight for the past several centuries, need to worry about how to handle right turns in a legal manner. Chiho smiled at how silly it all seemed.
“Plus, dealing with customers over the phone… You see how much it takes out of Emi, even, y’know? It’s not like I relish dealing with the weirder characters we get in here. And I guess there’s some kind of freaky meter or monitor attached to the scooters the company’s giving us. Like, what if it spots that I got lost somewhere and docks me points for that on some evaluation system? I’d be so scared of that, I wouldn’t know what to do. Geez, I wish I could attend the training!”
“Ah-ha-ha…”
Even with all her concern, not being able to join him in Ente Isla, she couldn’t help but laugh at him.
“Hey, it’s not that funny! I tell you, it’s a hell of a lot easier if you’re allowed to do whatever you want when you’re dealing with people. Human society puts up all these barriers to that. It’s a huge pain.”
“So once you rule over Japan as Devil King, are you gonna get rid of all that?”
“…You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you, Chi?”
“Yes.”
Maou sighed at her shameless poke.
“It just kinda sucks that I have these things I’m worried about, and I can’t deal with them before I have to go, y’know? Have a little sympathy.”
“Well,” the undeterred Chiho replied, “keep in mind that this time, I’m just gonna be standing here waiting.”
“Hmm?”
“That’s why just seeing the regular ol’ Maou here makes me really happy, you see?”
“Ermm…”
“So maybe you could try to put my mind at ease a little?” Chiho sharpened her lips in a show of dissatisfaction. “Like, maybe ‘I’ll totally be back here soon’ or ‘I’m gonna bring Yusa and Ashiya back safe’? Something I could rely on a little would be nice.”
Maou understood what she was getting at. It didn’t make him act any less pained over it.
“If I did that, that’d all but ensure I died in the third act of the movie, wouldn’t it? I heard something like that from Urushihara once.”
“Died… Oh, Maou!” Chiho protested. It sounded like an inappropriate joke to him, but Maou refused to budge.
“Like, if this were a movie and I said something like that to my heroine, then it’s a given that I’ll either die or, you know, things won’t go the way I’m planning them, right? If I go around making these huge promises to people I care about, that’ll get me all psyched up and make me lose my head out there. So during big moments like these, I’d like to… Chi?”
Maou intended to give a serious response. Now, though, there was a carefree smile on Chiho’s face.
“All right! I hear you loud and clear! That’s more than enough for me!”
Maou raised an eyebrow at Chiho’s apparent rapid mood swings. Hearing him use the term “heroine” raised her flagging spirits, no doubt. And there was certainly no denying that Maou was the hero of the adventure film running in her mind.
“Oh, right! Do you have that thing in hand yet, Maou?”
“Mmm? What thing? We’re pretty much all set with our Ente Isla gear.”
“Not that! I mean a present! For Emi!”
“A present? For Emi? …Oh! Ohhhh!”
It took a concerted search of his memory banks for Maou to remember.
“I totally forgot.”
“Awww…”
If Emi had actually returned home when she promised to, the entire gang would’ve held a tandem birthday party for her and Chiho. Realizing that, Maou simultaneously realized that he had given exactly the wrong response.
“But I, uh, I still have yours, Chi, to…uh, I mean, I was thinking about it!”
Another misstep. Given that it was a tandem birthday party, if Maou forgot about Emi’s present, it was a given he forgot about Chiho’s as well. But Chiho didn’t seem to mind. In fact:
“Oh, that’s fine. I’ve already received it from you.”
The response she gave made no sense at all.
Maou glanced aside. Something told him it wasn’t the first time Chiho had said something like that to him. But at least Chiho wasn’t hurt by his rudeness, and that was what chiefly mattered.
“Y’know, though, even if I had something for Emi, I sorta doubt she’d accept it.”
“Oh, that’s all right! Maybe she wouldn’t, no, but the fact that you get something for her at all is the important thing. I certainly don’t think it’d turn Yusa off, at least.”
Maou saw little point in spending money on a present the receiver would never accept. It all seemed odd to him. Why was she so intent on improving Emi’s impression of him at this point?
“That,” Chiho continued, eyes fixed upon Maou, “and something tells me that Yusa’s going through a lot of stress right now. Maybe her returning to Japan isn’t going to be this magical solution to everything, but… I mean, if we want her to feel better once she’s back, even just a little, I think you should really get her a present, Maou!”
She sounded serious about it. Maou remained dubious.
“So you’re agreeing with me that if I go through with that uninvited offer, she’ll yell at me and shout ‘I’ll never take a gift from the Devil King!’ and stuff?”
“Oh, Maou! There’s no way Yusa would…… All right, maybe there’s some way she would, but… Oh, you know…”
Chiho fell silent. She was a lot more confident of her assertion at the start of the sentence, but by the end, it was clear Maou’s scenario was a lot more probable.
Maou sighed. “Look, I know what you’re trying to say. Once Emi’s back, you want to do whatever you can to get her back to her loudmouthed old self, right?”
“R-right! Yeah, exactly!”
Chiho leaned forward a bit, fist in the air to prove her point.
“Okay, so…what? What’d you get for her, Chi? I’d like something to work with.”
“Me?” Chiho flashed an invincible smile of confidence. “I went with—”
“What are the two of you doing? Would you get back to work already?”
Their boss, exasperated that she was still missing two people up front, stomped up to them from the back room.
“I-I’m sorry, Ms. Kisaki!”
“Y-yes, ma’am!”
Both of them instinctively jumped away from the back room. Only then did they realize how long they had been talking.
In recent weeks, whenever Maou and Chiho shared a shift, they tended to staff the MgCafé space on the second floor. Their twin MgRonald Barista certifications were paying off for them, in other words. But as they found themselves chased up the stairs by Kisaki:
“…Pfft!”
Maou and Chiho each did a spit-take at the faces waiting at the other end.
“What’s with you guys?” Kisaki asked.
> “Er, no, um…”
“It, it’s nothing…”
It couldn’t have not been nothing. Because there, seated around a table at the far end, were Suzuno, Amane, Acieth, Rika—even Urushihara, who wasn’t even supposed to be fully recovered yet.
“I told these freaks to wait in the apartment,” Maou muttered to himself as Kisaki shooed him behind the bar counter, Chiho choosing to focus on the disinfected duster in hand as she cleaned the tables.
Once this shift ended, Maou and Suzuno were due to visit the National Museum of Western Art in the Ueno district. It would be their connecting hub to Ente Isla. And Maou knew that Rika asked if she could see them off, but it wasn’t even dinnertime yet. They wouldn’t be leaving until late night—how long did they plan to loiter in here, anyway?
Part of it could be explained, perhaps, by how Acieth couldn’t physically go too far away from Maou, like with Emi and Alas Ramus. But they had already tested it out, and the distance between Villa Rosa Sasazuka and the MgRonald at Hatagaya wasn’t a problem at all. Besides, he had to focus on his work shift. If she was here, that wasn’t going to happen.
“So, are those your friends at the table over there?”
And Kisaki just had to say that first thing, before Maou could sweep them all out of here.
“I see Ms. Kamazuki and…um, Urushihara? Your roommate, right? That girl with the pretty hair; she’s related to you, right?”
“Uh? Why…”
Maou stopped himself before he finished the sentence.
“Well, I mean, she’s a dead ringer for that young girl Chi and Ms. Kamazuki brought in here before. She’s your relative, too, isn’t she?”
That was right. Suzuno and Chiho had brought her in once, when they figured seeing Maou at work would calm Alas Ramus’s frayed nerves. From the eyes of Kisaki, who didn’t realize that the toddler and Acieth were sisters, the conclusion to make was rather obvious. The fact that Alas Ramus was the older sister was a point Maou reasoned was better left unexplained.
“Um… Yeah, that kind of thing.”
“You seem awful indecisive about it. And I don’t know those other two, but…”
It was Amane’s first time here. And Kisaki hadn’t been around at Rika’s last visit, either.
“By the way, Marko…”
“Yes?”
“Are you going on a long trip or something?”
“Huh?!”
“I don’t see what there is to be surprised about. I mean, you taking time off out of nowhere is a surprise in itself, but you’re gonna be trading off a heck of a lot of shifts. Something’s got Chi all hot and bothered, too, I think.”
“…What’s Chi got to do with it?”
“Well, if it doesn’t, then you really are a fool.”
It had not been Maou’s intention to hide it in particular, but having it laid out for him in black and white like this still made it feel tremendously awkward for him.
Kisaki looked at Chiho’s back as she fervently dusted a table. “It’d be pretty damaging for my location,” she observed, “if I had to lose two of my most vital weapons at the same time.”
“…I’ll see what I can do.”
“Hey, um, Suzuno?”
“What?”
“I got her beat when it comes to womanly charm, don’t I? Huh? Don’t I?”
“…I couldn’t say,” Suzuno replied to Amane’s furtive query.
“I don’t think she even realizes she’s supposed to be competing with you, dude.”
“H-hey…” Rika turned to Urushihara. “Is that manager, like, some kind of superwoman, too?”
“Uh? What makes you say that?”
“I mean, the Devil King’s practically her lapdog, right? Like, he’s supposed to be this grand pooh-bah of the devil world, isn’t he? Like some kind of god?”
“Kisaki’s just a regular Japanese woman,” Chiho interjected. “Just like you and me.”
“Ooooh! Chiho!”
Acieth quietly squealed with delight as Chiho, duster in hand, came closer to them.
“She is, huh? But…you call him Devil King, and I’ve seen him make Acieth appear and disappear and stuff, so I’m just wondering, like, why is Maou spending his time working some Joe Schmoe job like this?”
“It is something”—here, Suzuno took a sip of coffee for dramatic pause—“that baffles me to this day, yes.”
She was being honest with Rika. Maou tended to whine a lot about his lack of demonic force, but he still had at least a bare minimum stored inside him. Suzuno could tell. And she knew it would be more than enough to let Maou obtain all the money he wanted via illegal means—or mind-control Kisaki into giving him an hourly raise, for that matter. Whether it’d be worth expending magical force to do that was a question Suzuno chose not to ponder.
“I had thought,” Chiho suddenly said, “that it’s because Maou’s such a nice and serious-minded person…”
She turned to the register counter, finding Kisaki lecturing Maou on the seven habits of highly effective coffee pourers. Both he and Chiho had passed the required certification exam, but there was still a whole other dimension between that and earning Kisaki’s godlike coffee-making skills. Thus, ever since advancing into MgCafé, Maou had continued taking every chance to hone his bean-grinding techniques during slow times at work.
“If I had to guess,” Chiho continued, “he had all that power at his fingertips back during his king days, so…probably, he’s come to realize as a human that there’s not a lot he can do by himself.”
“Oh?” Suzuno prodded.
“I know this might put you and Yusa off a little, but something tells me that once Maou took over Ente Isla, he was intending to treat humans and demons as equals, at the end of it.”
The Suzuno of a while ago would have immediately fired back and shouted Chiho down before the argument went any further. Instead, she remained frozen, waiting for her to continue.
“Why d’you think that?” Urushihara asked instead.
“Because I met Camio.”
“Camio?” he shot back. It wasn’t a name he expected to come up. The jet-black avian warrior and current Devil Regent, Camio had appeared on the Choshi beach while the demons were working at Amane’s shop. Currently he was ruling over the demon realms in Maou’s stead—and given the unblemished politeness he showed Chiho, he must have been shrewd at it.
“And… I mean, you and Maou and Ashiya all look a lot different in demon form, but Camio was way more different. Wasn’t he? And Farfarello and Libicocco all looked so much different from you guys, too. It just made me wonder, do you demons have a lot of… I dunno if I should call them ‘races’ or whatever, but that kind of thing?”
Chiho looked down, realizing she was now clutching the duster with both hands.
“I guess Maou had to bring all these different ethnic groups under his control to take the throne, didn’t he? So I just thought maybe he’d try to win the human race over that way, too.”
“Ooh, I dunno,” Urushihara said in a chiding tone. “All I can say is, he sure didn’t give any orders like that.”
“He didn’t? Because I think he did.” This visibly riled Urushihara a little. Chiho kept her face stony. “Or maybe, Urushihara, you executed those orders without realizing it?”
“Pfft! No way! And I know Ashiya’d tell you the same thing, dude. We wanted to rule over the human world, so we—”
“See? That’s it right there.”
“Huh?”
“When you say you want to ‘rule over’ us, you mean that you want to incorporate our society into your own, don’t you?”
Urushihara and Suzuno, subjugator and subjugated, gave Chiho blank looks.
“I’m not saying that Ente Isla was better off ruled by the Devil King’s Army or anything. But I don’t think Maou ever intended to…like, wipe mankind from the face of the Earth, is all. Otherwise, why would he treat all us humans with so much respect and kindness once he joined our ranks?”
“That’s a very astute observation, Chiho,” said an admiring Amane.
“Yeah. I mean, demons can take people’s sadness—their anger, their fear—and transform it into power. If he really couldn’t stand the sight of mankind, he could’ve been a lot crueler with them than he was. He could’ve made them extinct, easy. But instead, he had four different Demon Generals ‘rule over’ the land. And that’s what made me think—the Devil King’s really that. A king. Not some kind of tyrant. A king can’t rule if he doesn’t respect the power of every single person in his realm.”
“A king?”
Suzuno looked down at the reflection in her cup of coffee. She recalled what Maou himself had told her, on that bench in the Shinjuku electronics store: “As long as we’re dealing with other people in this world, it’d be a lot more fun to focus on the good stuff that comes out of it. Plus, I’m a king. I have a duty to live that way for my followers.” She didn’t treat any of that seriously at the time—she wouldn’t have wanted to anyway—but the way Chiho put it, she had to admit that the girl had a point.
“Well,” Chiho continued, “still, this is all just supposition on my part. It’s probably rude of me to guess at what he’s thinking anyway, so…”
“What do you say, Chiho? The words, I don’t understand at all!”
Acieth took just a few moments from the slice of cheesecake she was currently devouring alone to look Chiho in the eye and give her an incongruous thumbs-up. It made her laugh a little.
“What I mean,” she offered, “is that you can have a lot of different thoughts in your mind at the same time, right? Even if they contradict each other. So maybe he’s just the kind of guy who grabs out at whatever has his attention at the moment, instead of thinking about stuff too deeply. You know?”
“You mean Maou is not thinking of anything?”
Chiho paused. Acieth had a knack for interpreting things exactly the way the other party didn’t want them to be.
“Well,” Amane summarized as Acieth and Urushihara gave her confused and miffed looks, respectively, “I suppose it comes down to this. There are too many people in world history who you could say were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. But what you’re thinking isn’t as complex as all that, is it?”
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 9 Page 12
